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Mexican-American children are educationally disadvantaged, are at-risk for academic failure, and have not demonstrated the academic achievement that other immigrant groups have, even after they have lived in the U.S. for many generations. Today, parental involvement is being touted by government officials and the popular press as one mechanism through which academic achievement can be increased. If parental involvement is indeed effective, it may be one mechanism for improving the achievement of Mexican-American students. For this research, causal modeling (path analysis) was used to investigate the influence of parental involvement on overall academic achievement, and the reading, math, science, and social studies achievement on 1,714 eighth grade Mexican-American children. This research utilized the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS 88), the third major national longitudinal survey developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Parental involvement, defined as discussing school activities and having high educational aspirations for children, positively affected all academic achievement areas. SES (socioeconomic status) and previous learning also had strong influences on achievement. Interestingly, as parents' language proficiency increased, parental involvement decreased, when controlling for the gender of the student, SES, parents' birth place, and previous learning. Gender differences were evident in all academic areas, and females received more attention than males from their parents. Family rules did not influence academic achievement and may in fact have a negative influence on social studies achievement. Since a good education is necessary for all who live in modern society, educators and policy makers should continue to encourage Mexican-American parents to discuss school activities and have high educational aspirations for their children. Parental involvement is one potentially alterable variable which can positively influence the academic achievement of Mexican-American children. / Ph. D.

Almost twenty-five years ago, James Coleman's Equalitv of Educational Opportunity reported that "Schools make no difference." Though it was received with dismay and frustration by liberal educators, the Coleman report was not the first to indicate that public schools give unequal access to the "American dream." Since that time theorists have attempted to develop models to explain why students tend to exit the educational system with much the same social and economic potential as their parents. / Ed. D.

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Graduation date: 1993

In this thesis, I examine the resistance, privileges, and costs of Chicana textual identity issues in an academic arena that, by design, fragments voice and dictates choice. The scarcity in research of Chicana identity through mixed-language writing in composition depicts an existing chasm between academic demographics and university sentiments. Educational institutions that neglect to investigate, engage, and participate in textual identity perpetuate accepted pensamiento. Therefore, insight to Chicana thought, culture, and educational experiences may assist and inform the teaching dominant culture, not to separate, but to conjoin information with experience for those seeking diversity.

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether differences exist between reports of parental stress in Mexican American and Caucasian mothers of children with ADHD. A second purpose was to examine whether there were child and family characteristics that made unique contributions to levels of parenting stress in Mexican American parents of children with ADHD. A third purpose was to examine the role that level of acculturation plays in the Mexican American mothers' reports of stress. Dependent measures used in this study include the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL).

Through ethnography, I examine how hip-hop’s expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically prolific, politically charged, and racially diverse hip-hop “scenes” in the world. This focus on regional specificity provides a greater understanding of the impact hip-hop is having on the ground, as an aspect of localized lived practice. Throughout, I make the case for the importance of ethnographically grounded localized research on U.S. hip-hop, which is surprisingly still relatively rare. Most scholars simply stress its continuity within a set of deterritorialized Diasporic African and African-American verbal-art traditions. My aim is not to contest this assertion, but to add to the body of knowledge about one of the most significant cultural inventions of the twentieth century by exploring hip-hop’s racial heterogeneity and its regional specificity. Acknowledging this kind of diversity allows us to reconceive what hip-hop is and how it matters in U.S. society beyond the ways it is usually framed: as either an oppositional form of black-vernacular culture or a co-opted and corrupted commodity form that reinscribes hegemonic values more than it actually contests them. Examining hip-hop within a specific, regionally delineated community reveals how hip-hop’s role in American life is more nuanced and complex. It is neither a pure vernacular expression of an oppressed class nor merely a cultural commodity imposed upon consumers and alienated from producers. In the Bay Area, hip-hop “heads” simultaneously consume mass-produced rap while producing homespun forms of music, dance, slang, fashion, and folklore. Through these forms, they construct individual and group identities that register primarily in expressive, affective terms. These novel cultural identities complicate rigid social markers of race, gender, and class; more specifically, they challenge the widely held perception that hip-hop is solely the terrain of inner-city young African-American men. More fundamentally, a sense of belonging is engendered through localized modes of expression and embodied style that manifest through shared practices, discourses, texts, symbols, locales, and imaginaries. / text

A comparison study of cardiovascular risk factors between Anglos and Mexican-American Hispanics, by gender and age, was conducted with 1343 subjects in Pima County, Arizona. Data was collected through public health screenings at a variety of sites (39) throughout the community. A self-administered questionnaire and measurements of height, weight, blood pressure, total blood cholesterol and blood glucose provided the data. Risk factors (total blood cholesterol, hypertension, smoking, genetic tendency, diabetes, obesity and lack of exercise) were analyzed individually and in combination by age, gender and ethnicity. Some of the significant findings (p ≤ 0.05) were females, greater than 50 years of age, had higher cholesterol levels and more multiple risk factors than comparable males, that more Anglos (p ≤ .005) both males and females, had elevated blood cholesterol levels than did Mexican-Americans but that Mexican-Americans were more obese and exercised less than Anglos.